Roslyn Sulcas

Growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, I was an obsessed ballet student, regarding school as an utter waste of pre-dance-class time. But although I pored over the English magazine, "Dance and Dancers" and cut out every dance review I could find to paste into a scrapbook (yes, it was that bad), it never occurred to me that I might write about dance.

When it turned out, after a stint at full-time dancing, that I wasn't going to be a ballet dancer, I went to university to study English literature. It was only many years later, when I had gone to do a post-graduate degree at York University in England that I began to watch dance performances again, drawn inexorably to London on my weekends and planning trips to the British Library around Royal Ballet casting.

Growing up during the apartheid years in South Africa, I had seen mostly 19th-century classical ballets or pastiches thereof-hardly any other ballet and almost no contemporary dance apart from work staged by stalwart amateur groups (one of which I joined while at university.).

After two years in the UK, I moved myself and my thesis to Paris, where one of my first theatre outings was to go and see the San Francisco Ballet at the Theatre de Champs-Elysees. On the program was William Forsythe's "New Sleep," a work he had made for that company in 1987. I was utterly transfixed by the piece; in one stroke, it made me realize that ballet could be a contemporary art form, and that my own frustrations with it were born of a certain place and time; not an inevitable result of ballet's limitations.

I wanted to write about what I saw in Forsythe's work, and although most dance magazines that I contacted politely said no (or just ignored me), the editor of the London-based Dance Theater Journal replied kindly, saying that if I wrote something about Forsythe, they would read it.

I wrote something (a very long something); they read it-and to my delight, they published it, with Forsythe on the cover. Suddenly I was a dance writer, and I began to discover a whole world of European dance, both ballet and contemporary, that weren't part of any frame of reference I had from either South Africa or England.

After living in France for seven years, I moved to New York, where I have discovered another cultural world, different ways to look at dance. Those multiple frames of reference have been important to me as a critic. It's fascinating to realize just how great the variation can be within different cultures; how what is considered important or valuable in an art form literally changes the way we see work.

For that reason, I think my favorite pieces (who knows if they are my best?) have been about those cultural intersections; about the artists who are considered major talents in one part of the world and ignored in another; about what part the arts play in different societies, and how they speak of those societies. In the U.S., as in France, I frequently feel like an outsider peering in; but that can be a good spot for a critic to inhabit. -- Roslyn Sulcas

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The Barbican Center has announced its coming season, which features new theater productions from Ivo van Hove and Simon McBurney and a celebration of the life and work of Dr. Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog synthesizer.